Nigger

In the English language, the word nigger is a racial slur usually directed at black people. The word originated as a variation of the Spanish and Portuguese noun negro, a descendant of the Latin adjective niger ("black").[1] It was often used derogatorily, and by the mid-twentieth century, particularly in the United States, its usage became unambiguously pejorative, a racist insult. Accordingly, it began to disappear from popular culture, and its continued inclusion in classic works of literature has sparked controversy. Because the term is considered extremely offensive, it is often replaced with the euphemism "the N-word".

Contents

Etymology and history

The variants neger and negar derive from the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black), and from the now-pejorative French nègre. Etymologically, negro, noir, nègre, and nigger ultimately derive from nigrum, the stem of the Latinniger (black) (pronounced [ˈniɡer] which, in every other grammatical case, grammatical gender, and grammatical number besides nominative masculine singular, is nigr-, the r is trilled).

In its original English language usage, nigger (then spelled niger) was a word for a dark-skinned individual. The earliest known published use of the term dates from 1574, in a work alluding to "the Nigers of Aethiop, bearing witnes".[2] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first derogatory usage of the term nigger was recorded two centuries later, in 1775.[3]

During the fur trade of the early 1800s to the late 1840s in the Western United States, the word was spelled "niggur", and is often recorded in literature of the time. George Fredrick Ruxton used it in his "mountain man" lexicon, without pejorative connotation. "Niggur" was evidently similar to the modern use of "dude" or "guy". This passage from Ruxton's Life in the Far West illustrates the word in spoken form—the speaker here referring to himself: "Travler, marm, this niggur's no travler; I ar' a trapper, marm, a mountain-man, wagh!"[7] It was not used as a term exclusively for blacks among mountain men during this period, as Indians, Mexicans, and Frenchmen and Anglos alike could be a "niggur".[8] "The noun slipped back and forth from derogatory to endearing."[9]

The term "colored" or "negro" became a respectful alternative. In 1851 the Boston Vigilance Committee, an Abolitionist organization, posted warnings to the Colored People of Boston and vicinity. Writing in 1904, journalist Clifton Johnson documented the "opprobrious" character of the word nigger, emphasizing that it was chosen in the South precisely because it was more offensive than "colored" or "negro".[10] By the turn of the century, "colored" had become sufficiently mainstream that it was chosen as the racial self-identifier for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 2008 Carla Sims, its communications director, said "the term 'colored' is not derogatory, [the NAACP] chose the word 'colored' because it was the most positive description commonly used [in 1909, when the association was founded]. It's outdated and antiquated but not offensive."[11]

In the 1990s, "Black" was displaced in favor of "African American", an example of what linguist Steven Pinker calls the "euphemism treadmill". Moreover, as a compound word, African American resembles the vogue wordAfro-American, an early-1970s popular usage. Some black Americans continue to use the word nigger, often spelled as nigga and niggah, without irony, either to neutralize the word's impact or as a sign of solidarity.[13]

In the 1990s, dune coon would also evolve as an equivalent of the variant sand nigger, an epithet directed at persons of Middle Eastern heritage.[14]

Usages

United Kingdom

In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), H. W. Fowler states that applying the word nigger to "others than full or partial negroes" is "felt as an insult by the person described, & betrays in the speaker, if not deliberate insolence, at least a very arrogant inhumanity"; but the second edition (1965) states: "N. has been described as 'the term that carries with it all the obloquy and contempt and rejection which whites have inflicted on blacks.'"

In explaining his refusal to be conscripted to fight the Vietnam War (1965–75), professional boxer Muhammad Ali said, "No Vietcong [Vietnamese soldier] ever called me nigger";[15] later, his modified answer was the title No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger (1968) of a documentary about the front-line lot of the U.S. Army Black soldier in combat in Vietnam.[16] An Ali biographer reports that, when interviewed by Robert Lipsyte in 1966, the boxer actually said, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong".[17]

On February 28, 2007, the New York City Council symbolically banned the use of the word nigger; however, there is no penalty for using it. This formal resolution also requests excluding from Grammy Award consideration every song whose lyrics contain the word; however, Ron Roecker, vice president of communication for the Recording Academy, doubted that it will have any effect on actual nominations.[18][19]

The word can be invoked politically for effect. When Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick came under intense scrutiny for his personal conduct in 2008, he deviated from an address to city council, saying, "In the past 30 days, I've been called a nigger more than any time in my entire life." Opponents accused him of "playing the race card" to save his political life.[20]

Cultural use

Historian Eugene Genovese, noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South, uses the word pointedly in The World the Slaveholders Made (1988).

For reasons common to the slave condition all slave classes displayed a lack of industrial initiative and produced the famous Lazy Nigger, who under Russian serfdom and elsewhere was white. Just as not all blacks, even under the most degrading forms of slavery, consented to become niggers, so by no means all or even most of the niggers in history have been black.

Of course, no one considered himself a nigger. It was always something you called someone who could be considered anything less than you. I soon found out there were a few black families living in Old Colony. They'd lived there for years and everyone said that they were okay, that they weren't niggers but just black. It felt good to all of us to not be as bad as the hopeless people in D Street or, God forbid, the ones in Columbia Point, who were both black and niggers. But now I was jealous of the kids in Old Harbor Project down the road, which seemed like a step up from Old Colony...

Addressing the use of nigger by black people, philosopher and public intellectualCornel West said in 2007, "There's a certain rhythmic seduction to the word. If you speak in a sentence, and you have to say cat, companion, or friend, as opposed to nigger, then the rhythmic presentation is off. That rhythmic language is a form of historical memory for black people... When Richard Pryor came back from Africa, and decided to stop using the word onstage, he would sometimes start to slip up, because he was so used to speaking that way. It was the right word at the moment to keep the rhythm together in his sentence making."[22]

The implied racism of the word nigger has rendered its usages social taboo. Magazines and newspapers often do not use it but instead print "family-friendly", censored versions, usually "n*gg*r", "n**ger", "n——", and "the N-word";[23] see below.

Popular culture

Commercial products

Poster for "Nigger Hair" tobacco, later known as "Bigger Hair"

In the US, the word nigger featured in branding and packaging consumer products, e.g., "Nigger Hair Tobacco" and "Niggerhead Oysters". As the term became less acceptable in mainstream culture, the tobacco brand became "Bigger Hair" and the canned goods brand became "Negro Head".[24][25] An Australian company produced various sorts of licorice candy under the "Nigger Boy" label. These included candy cigarettes and one box with an image of an Indian snake charmer.[26][27][28] Compare these with the various national varieties and names for chocolate-coated marshmallow treats, and with Darlie, formerly Darkie, toothpaste.

Plants and animals

Some colloquial or local names for plants and animals used to include the word "nigger" or "niggerhead".

The colloquial names for echinacea (coneflower) are "Kansas niggerhead" and "Wild niggerhead". The cotton-top cactus (Echinocactus polycephalus) is a round, cabbage-sized plant covered with large, crooked thorns, and used to be known in Arizona as the "niggerhead cactus". In the early 20th century, double-crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) were known in some areas of Florida as "nigger geese".[29] In some parts of the U.S., Brazil nuts were known as "nigger toes".[30]

The movie Full Metal Jacket (1987) depicts black and white U.S. Marines enduring boot camp and later fighting together in Vietnam. "Nigger" is used by soldiers of both races in jokes and as expressions of bravado ("put a nigger behind the trigger", says the black Corporal "Eightball"), with racial differences among the men seen as secondary to their shared exposure to the dangers of combat: Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) says, "There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops or greasers. Here you are all equally worthless."

In 1999, the British television network ITV broadcast a censored version with each of the twelve[36] utterances of Nigger deleted. Replying to complaints against its censorship, ITV blamed the regional broadcaster, London Weekend Television, which, in turn, blamed a junior employee as the unauthorised censor. In June 2001, when ITV re-broadcast the censored version of The Dam Busters, the Index on Censorship criticised it as "unnecessary and ridiculous" censorship breaking the continuity of the film and the story.[37] In January 2012 the film was shown uncensored on ITV4, but with a warning at the start that the film contained racial terms from the historical period which some people could find offensive. Versions of the film edited for US television have the dog's name altered to "Trigger".[36]

In 1897, Joseph Conrad penned a novella titled The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', whose titular character, James Wait, is a West Indian black sailor on board the merchant ship Narcissus sailing from Bombay to London. In the United States, the novel was first published with the title The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, at the insistence by the publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company, that no one would buy or read a book with the word "nigger" in its title,[42] not because the word was deemed offensive but that a book about a black man would not sell.[43] In 2009, WordBridge Publishing published a new edition titled The N-Word of the Narcissus, which also excised the word "nigger" from the text. According to the publisher, the point was to get rid of the offensive word, which may have led readers to avoid the book, and make it more accessible.[44] Though praised in some quarters, many others denounced the change as censorship.

The writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten took the opposite view to Conrad's publishers when he advised the British novelist Ronald Firbank to change the title of his 1924 novel Sorrow in Sunlight to Prancing Nigger for the American market,[45] and it became very successful there under that title.[46] Van Vechten, a white supporter of the Harlem Renaissance (1920s–30s), then used the word himself in his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, which provoked controversy in the black community. Of the controversy, Langston Hughes wrote:

No book could possibly be as bad as Nigger Heaven has been painted. And no book has ever been better advertised by those who wished to damn it. Because it was declared obscene, everybody wanted to read it, and I'll venture to say that more Negroes bought it than ever purchased a book by a Negro author. Then, as now, the use of the word nigger by a white was a flashpoint for debates about the relationship between black culture and its white patrons.

Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain's novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) has long been the subject of controversy for its racial content. Huckleberry Finn was the fifth most challenged book during the 1990s, according to the American Library Association.[50] The novel is written from the point of view, and largely in the language, of an uneducated white boy, who is drifting down the Mississippi River on a raft with an adult escaped slave, Jim. The word "nigger" is used (mostly about Jim) over 200 times.[51][52] Twain's advocates[who?] note that the novel is composed in then-contemporary vernacular usage, not racist stereotype, because Jim, the black man, is a sympathetic character.

In 2011, a new edition published by NewSouth Books replaced the word "nigger" with "slave" and also removed the word "injun". The change was spearheaded by Twain scholar Alan Gribben in the hope of "countering the 'pre-emptive censorship'" that results from the book's being removed from school curricula over language concerns.[53][54] The changes sparked outrage from critics Elon James, Alexandra Petrie and Chris Meadows.[55]

British usages

"How the Leopard Got His Spots"

Several late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literary usages suggest neutral usage. The popular Victorian era entertainment, the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Mikado (1885), twice uses the word nigger. In the song As some day it may happen, the executioner, Ko-ko, sings of executing the "nigger serenader and the others of his race", referring to white singers with their faces blacked singing minstrel songs. In the song A more humane Mikado, the Mikado sings of the punishment for older women who dye their hair or wear corsets, to be "Blacked like a nigger/With permanent walnut juice." Both lyrics are usually changed for modern performances.[56]

The word "nigger" appears in children's literature. "How the Leopard Got His Spots", in the Just So Stories (1902) by Rudyard Kipling, tells of an Ethiopian man and a leopard, both originally sand-colored, deciding to camouflage themselves with painted spots, for hunting in tropical forest. The story originally included a scene wherein the leopard (now spotted) asks the Ethiopian man why he does not want spots. In contemporary editions of "How the Leopard Got His Spots", the Ethiopian's original reply ("Oh, plain black's best for a nigger") has been edited to, "Oh, plain black's best for me." The counting rhyme known as "Eenie Meenie Mainee, Mo" has been attested from 1820, with many variants; when Kipling included it as "A Counting-Out Song" in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923), he gave as its second line, "Catch a nigger by the toe!" This version became widely used for much of the twentieth century; the rhyme is still in use, but the second line now uses "tiger" instead.

The first Jeeves novel, Thank You, Jeeves (1934), features a minstrel show as a significant plot point. Bertie Wooster, who is trying to learn to play the banjo, is in admiration of their artistry and music. Tellingly, P.G. Wodehouse has the repeated phrase "nigger minstrels" only on the lips of Wooster and his peers; the manservant Jeeves uses the more genteel "Negroes".

In short story "The Basement Room" (1935), by Graham Greene, the (sympathetic) servant character, Baines, tells the admiring boy, son of his employer, of his African British colony service, "You wouldn't believe it now, but I've had forty niggers under me, doing what I told them to". Replying to the boy's question: "Did you ever shoot a nigger?" Bains answers: "I never had any call to shoot. Of course I carried a gun. But you didn't need to treat them bad, that just made them stupid. Why, I loved some of those dammed niggers." The cinematic version, The Fallen Idol (1948), directed by Carol Reed, replaced this usage with "natives".[citation needed]

The 1932 British song "The Sun Has Got His Hat On" originally included the line "He's been tanning niggers out in Timbuktu" (where "He" is the sun). Modern recordings substitute other lines.

The Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák wrote the String Quartet No. 12 in 1893 during his time in the United States. For its presumed association with African-American music, the quartet was referred to until the 1950s with nicknames such as "Negro Quartet" and "Nigger Quartet" before being called the "American Quartet".

Theatre

The musical Show Boat, which subverts anti-miscegenation laws, from 1927 until 1946 features the word "nigger" as originally integral to the lyrics of "Ol' Man River" and "Cotton Blossom"; although deleted from the cinema versions, it is included in the 1988 EMI recording of the original score. Musical theatre historian Miles Kreuger and conductor John McGlinn propose that the word was not an insult, but a blunt illustration of how white people then perceived black people.

Colors

A shade of dark brown used to be known as "nigger brown" or simply "nigger";[61] other colors were also prefixed with the word. Usage as a color word continued for some time after it was no longer acceptable about people.[62]

In 1960, a stand at the stadium in Toowoomba, Australia, was named the "E. S. 'Nigger' Brown Stand" honoring 1920s rugby league player Edwin Brown, so ironically nicknamed since early life because of his pale white skin; so known all his life, his tombstone is engraved Nigger. Stephen Hagan, a lecturer at the Kumbari/Ngurpai Lag Higher Education Center of the University of Southern Queensland, sued the Toowoomba council over the use of nigger in the stand's name; the district and state courts dismissed his lawsuit. He appealed to the High Court of Australia, who ruled the naming matter beyond federal jurisdiction. At first some local Aborigines did not share Mr Hagan's opposition to nigger.[67] Hagan appealed to the United Nations, winning a committee recommendation to the Australian federal government, that it force the Queensland state government to remove the word nigger from the "E. S. 'Nigger' Brown Stand" name. The Australian federal government followed the High Court's jurisdiction ruling. In September 2008, the stand was demolished. The Queensland Sports Minister, Judy Spence, said that using nigger would be unacceptable, for the stand or on any commemorative plaque. The 2005 book The N Word: One Man's Stand by Hagan includes this episode.[67][68]

Place names

Many places in the United States, and some in Canada, were given names that included the word "nigger", usually named after a person, or for a perceived resemblance of a geographic feature to a human being (see Niggerhead). Most of these place names have long been changed. In 1967, the United States Board on Geographic Names changed the word nigger to Negro in 143 place names.[citation needed]

Sometimes other substitutes for "nigger" were used. "Nigger Head Mountain", at Burnet, Texas, was named because the forest atop it resembled a black man's hair. In 1966, the First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, denounced the racist name, asking the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and the U.S. Forest Service to rename it, becoming "Colored Mountain" in 1968.[citation needed] Other renamings were more creative. "Nigger Head Rock", protruding from a cliff above Highway 421, north of Pennington Gap, Virginia, was renamed "Great Stone Face" in the 1970s.[citation needed]

Some names have been metaphorically or literally wiped off the map. In the 1990s, the public authorities stripped the names of "Niggertown Marsh" and the neighbouring Niggertown Knoll in Florida from public record and maps, which was the site of an early settlement of freed black people.[78] A watercourse in the Sacramento Valley was known as Big Nigger Sam's Slough.[79]

Sign replaced in September, 2016

Sometimes a name changes more than once: a peak above Santa Monica, California was first renamed "Negrohead Mountain", and in February 2010 was renamed again to Ballard Mountain, in honor of John Ballard, a black pioneer who settled the area in the nineteenth century. A point on the Lower Mississippi River, in West Baton Rouge Parish, that was named "Free Nigger Point" until the late twentieth century, first was renamed "Free Negro Point", but currently is named "Wilkinson Point".[80] "Nigger Bill Canyon" in southeast Utah was named after William Grandstaff, a mixed-race cowboy who lived there in the late 1870s.[81] In the 1960s, it was renamed Negro Bill Canyon. Within the past few years, there has been a campaign to rename it again, as Granstaff Canyon, but this is opposed by the local NAACP chapter, whose president said "Negro is an acceptable word".[82] However the trailhead for the hiking trail up the canyon was renamed in September, 2016 to "Grandstaff Trailhead"[83] The new sign for the trailhead was stolen within five days of installation.[84]

A few places in Canada also used the word. At Penticton, British Columbia, "Niggertoe Mountain" was renamed Mount Nkwala. The place-name derived from a 1908 Christmas story about three black men who died in a blizzard; the next day, the bodies of two were found at the foot of the mountain.[85]John Ware, an influential cowboy in early Alberta, has several features named after him, including "Nigger John Ridge", which is now John Ware Ridge.[86]

Intragroup versus intergroup usage

Black listeners often react to the term differently, depending on whether it is used by white speakers or by black speakers. In the former case, it is regularly understood as insensitive or insulting; in the latter, it may carry notes of in-group disparagement, and is often understood as neutral or affectionate, a possible instance of reappropriation.[citation needed]

In the black community, nigger is often rendered as nigga, representing the pronunciation of the word in African-American English. This usage has been popularized by the rap and hip-hop music cultures and is used as part of an in-group lexicon and speech. It is not necessarily derogatory and is often used to mean homie or friend.[87]

Acceptance of intra-group usage of the word nigga is still debated,[87] although it has established a foothold amongst younger generations. The NAACP denounces the use of both "nigga" and "nigger". Mixed-race usage of "nigga" is still considered taboo, particularly if the speaker is white. However, trends indicate that usage of the term in intragroup settings is increasing even amongst white youth, due to the popularity of rap and hip hop culture.[88]

According to Arthur K. Spears in Diverse Issues in Higher Education, 2006:

In many African-American neighborhoods, nigga is simply the most common term used to refer to any male, of any race or ethnicity. Increasingly, the term has been applied to any person, male or female. "Where y'all niggas goin?" is said with no self-consciousness or animosity to a group of women, for the routine purpose of obtaining information. The point: Nigga is evaluatively neutral in terms of its inherent meaning; it may express positive, neutral or negative attitudes;[89]

Kevin Cato, meanwhile, observes:

For instance, a show on Black Entertainment Television, a cable network aimed at a black audience, described the word nigger as a "term of endearment." "In the African American community, the word nigga (not nigger) brings out feelings of pride" (Davis 1). Here the word evokes a sense of community and oneness among black people. Many teens I interviewed felt that the word had no power when used amongst friends, but when used among white people the word took on a completely different meaning. In fact, comedian Alex Thomas on BET stated, "I still better not hear no white boy say that to me... I hear a white boy say that to me, it means 'White boy, you gonna get your ass beat.'"[90]

Related words

Derivatives

Anti-abolitionist cartoon from the 1860 presidential campaign illustrating colloquial usage of "Nigger in the woodpile"

In American English, nigger lover initially applied to abolitionists, then to white people sympathetic towards black Americans.[93] The portmanteau word wigger (white + nigger) denotes a white person emulating "street black behavior", hoping to gain acceptance to the hip hop, thug, and gangsta sub-cultures. Norman Mailer wrote of the antecedents of this phenomenon in 1957 in his essay "The White Negro".

Key prosecution witness Detective Mark Fuhrman, of the Los Angeles Police Department – who denied using racist language on duty – impeached himself with his prolific use of nigger in tape recordings about his police work. The recordings, by screenplay writer Laura McKinney, were from a 1985 research session wherein the detective assisted her with a screenplay about LAPD policewomen. Fuhrman excused his use of the word saying he used nigger in the context of his "bad cop" persona. The popular press reporting and discussing Fuhrman's testimony substituted the N-word for nigger.

Nigra is the Latin feminine form of niger (black), used in biologic and anatomic names such as substantia nigra (black substance).

The word niggardly (miserly) is etymologically unrelated to nigger, derived from the Old Norse word nig (stingy) and the Middle English word nigon. In the US, this word has been misinterpreted as related to nigger and taken as offensive. In January 1999, David Howard, a white Washington, D.C. city employee, was compelled to resign after using niggardly—in a financial context—while speaking with black colleagues, who took umbrage. After reviewing the misunderstanding, Mayor Anthony Williams offered to reinstate Howard to his former position. Howard refused reinstatement but took a job elsewhere in the mayor's government.[96]

Denotational extension

The denotations of nigger also comprehend non-black/non-white and other disadvantaged people. Some of these terms are self-chosen, to identify with the oppression and resistance of black Americans; others are ethnic slurs used by outsiders.

In 1969, in the course of being interviewed by the British magazine Nova, artist Yoko Ono said "woman is the nigger of the world"; three years later, her husband, John Lennon, published the song Woman Is the Nigger of the World —about the worldwide phenomenon of discrimination against women–which was socially and politically controversial to US sensibilities.

Sand nigger, an ethnic slur against Arabs, and timber nigger and prairie nigger, ethnic slurs against Native Americans, are examples of the racist extension of nigger upon other non-white peoples.[97]

Other languages

Other languages, particularly Romance languages, have words that sound similar to 'nigger' (are homophonic), but do not mean the same. Just because the words are cognate, i.e. they ultimately derive from the same Latin stem explained above, does not mean that they carry equivalent connotations. Whether a word is abusive, pejorative, neutral, affectionate, old-fashioned, etc. depends on its cultural context. How a word is used in English does not determine how a similar-sounding word is used in another language. Conversely, many languages have ethnic slurs that are disparaging of "other" people, i.e. words that serve a similar function to "nigger", but these may stem from completely different roots.

Some examples of how other languages refer to a black person in a neutral and in a pejorative way include:

Dutch: neger used to be neutral, but many now consider it to be avoided;[99][100][101][102]zwartje (little black one) can be amicably or offensively used, nikker is always pejorative[103]

German: Neger, in contrast, as the equivalent of "negro", is dated and now considered offensive, while Schwarze/-r ("black [person]") or Farbige/-r ("colored [person]") is mostly neutral.

Brazilian Portuguese: negro and preto are neutral;[104] nevertheless preto can be offensively used, is sometimes regarded as "politically incorrect" and almost never proudly used by Afro-Brazilians; crioulo and macaco are always extremely pejorative[105]

Haitian Creole: nèg is used for any man in general, regardless of skin color (like "dude" in American English) although it is derived from French: nègre, which is used pejoratively.

^"More Racist Licorice". Blah blah blah. November 30, 2008. The other day I posted about Nigger Boy Licorice, a brand of sweet that was popular in Australia for many years up until the mid-1960s when it was suddenly realised that people found the name Nigger Boy to be offensive rather than amusing. [...] I do have a few various offensive advertisements that the company made.

^Best, Daniel (March 16, 2007). "Racist Comic Book Ads". 20th century Danny Boy. Retrieved 16 May 2016. ...the one thing I did show which left everyone in the room speechless was this ad, taken from an old Australian comic (I think it was a Dagwood comic. I have it downstairs buried in a box somewhere). If the ad wasn't enough then what really stunned people was when I told them that this ad appeared in all it's glory in the mid to late 1960s. There was more discussion about this ad and it's merits than anything else in the entire course...

^Brazili, Matt (July 14, 2000). "Actually, My Hair Isn't Red". The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Retrieved 2014-11-15. Hearing angmo so often took me back to my childhood, when my friends and I used the words Jew and Gyp (the latter short for Gypsy) as verbs, meaning to cheat. At that time, in the 1960s, other racial epithets, these based on physical appearance, were commonly heard: cracker, slant-eye, bongo lips, knit-head. To digress to the ludicrous, Brazil nuts were called "nigger toes."